Supply chain and logistics are essential functions for any business that deals with the production, distribution, and delivery of goods and services, even if this is for your own business, a third-party, or a customer.
However, managing a supply chain and logistic operations can be challenging, especially in today’s complex and dynamic environment. Some of the common difficulties faced by supply chain and logistics managers are:
- Demand uncertainty: It is hard to predict the demand for products and services accurately, especially when customer preferences change rapidly, and new competitors enter the market. Demand uncertainty can lead to overstocking or understocking of inventory, resulting in higher costs and lower customer satisfaction.
- Supply volatility: The supply of raw materials, components, and finished goods can be affected by various factors, such as natural disasters, geopolitical conflicts, trade disputes, labor strikes, and quality issues. Supply volatility can cause disruptions and delays in the supply chain, affecting the availability and cost of products and services.
- Complexity and fragmentation: The supply chain and logistics involve multiple stakeholders, such as suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers, each with their own objectives, processes, and systems. The coordination and integration of these stakeholders can be challenging, especially when they operate in different regions, countries, and cultures. Complexity and fragmentation can result in inefficiencies, errors, and conflicts in the supply chain and logistics.
- Compliance and sustainability: The supply chain and logistics must comply with various regulations and standards, such as environmental, social, ethical, and safety requirements, imposed by governments, customers, and society. The compliance and sustainability of the supply chain and logistics can affect the reputation, profitability, and competitiveness of the business.
Traditionally, a team of people is normally in charge of the supply chain and most of the team isolates the different aspects of the supply chain by sectioning off the portion of data related to their own field. This leads to everyone creating their own analysis, reporting, and metrics and not always sharing all their acquired knowledge and analysis made. This situation aggravates the overall management of the supply chain.
To overcome these difficulties and improve the performance and resilience of the supply chain and logistics, businesses need a powerful and comprehensive analytics solution that can help them gain insights, optimize decisions, and automate actions. This is where Microsoft Fabric comes in.
How Microsoft Fabric Improves Supply Chain and Logistics
Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution built on a foundation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), it takes simplicity and integration to a level that helps teams to work more horizontally by sharing knowledge and data.
Some of the benefits offered by Microsoft Fabric for supply chain and logistics are:
- OneLake: OneLake is a unified data lake that can store all the data, regardless of its format or source. It enables users to access and analyze their data from a single location, without having to move or copy it. With OneLake, any supply chain management organization can store one copy of data to use further.
- Data Engineering: Data Engineering experience provides a Spark platform with great authoring experiences, enabling data engineers to perform large-scale data transformation. With this environment, businesses can process and transform their data in a scalable and efficient way. It also allows ingestion from any type of source, from third party repositories to real time transportation data. All in one place.
- Data Science: Data Science experience provides a rich environment for data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models using Azure Machine Learning and other open-source frameworks. It also supports AutoML, which automates the process of finding the best model for a given dataset and problem. Making delivery forecast or demand forecast is possible with this environment and everything unified within the same environment.
- Real-Time Analytics: Real-Time Analytics experience provides a fast and easy way to build and manage real-time streaming applications using Azure Stream Analytics and Azure Event Hubs. It also supports Power BI streaming datasets, which enable users to create real-time dashboards and reports.
- Business Intelligence: Business Intelligence experience provides a seamless integration with Power BI, the leading business intelligence tool from Microsoft. It allows users to create stunning reports and dashboards using the data from the lakehouse, and share them with others in the organization.
Conclusion
Microsoft Fabric facilitates the unity of all teams and different members within the same environment, making it simpler to share knowledge and trace back any data from ingestion to analysis. Within a supply chain organization, only this common environment has the ability to eliminate multiple inefficiencies and improve reaction and decision-making in a more effective way.
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